medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
here's the latest book on this week's Burning Issue in Dante Studies, of
interest to so many here.
however, the reviewer neglects to point out that this Looney fellow forgot to
include a significant "Black" title in his study:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0039192/
(a visually quite *Magnicent* and Stunning film, btw)
c
------ Original Message ------
Received: Mon, 05 Mar 2012 11:26:49 AM EST
From: The Medieval Review <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: TMR 12.03.03 Looney, Freedom Riders (Rankine)
Looney, Dennis. <i>Freedom Readers: The African American Reception of
Dante Alighieri and the Divine Comedy</i>. Notre Dame Devers Series
Dante & Medieval Italian Literature. South Bend: University of Notre
Dame Press, 2011. Pp. 296. $30.00. ISBN: 0268033862, ISBN-13:
9780268033866.
Reviewed by Patrice D. Rankine
Purdue University
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Dante Alighieri's <i>Commedia</i>, completed within the first quarter
of the fourteenth century, has the resilience that is the <i>sine qua
non</i> of a classical work. In the composition (which has come to be
known as "The Divine Comedy"), consisting of <i>Inferno</i>,
<i>Purgatorio</i>, and <i>Paradiso</i>, the narrator journeys from
Good Friday through Easter, through concentric circles, into depths of
punishment and redemption. The great Latin poet Virgil, an emblem from
the past, is Dante's guide, with Beatrice, Dante's companion in
paradise, holding the hope of the future. The triumph of the poem is
in its balance between the real and the allegorical, the presence of
historical figures known to all, and the symbolism that encapsulates
the ever-present fears and profound emotional longings of its readers.
Dante's deft management of these extremes makes <i>The Divine
Comedy</i> a timeless classic. Also critical to its staying power is
its author's popularization of the Italian vernacular. Dante's break
from the Latin language and epic form defies the continuity and
artistic deference that Virgil--and Ulysses, another figure the
narrator encounters--embodies. This constant pressing forward while
looking back is <i>The Divine Comedy</i>'s gait. Dante chastises
historical Popes, but he celebrates Saint John and Thomas Aquinas,
writers whose contributions to the human sciences guarantee them an
eternal, even divine, status. Given Dante's treatment of Popes (from
Anastasius II to John XXII), vanguards of the Protestant Reformation,
as well as Anglicans, deployed Dante to their cause, as Looney
recounts, and it is in this milieu that Dante becomes the
Liberationist, <i>The Divine Comedy</i> a poem evocative of freedom in
the context of African American poetics.
In many places, the literary trope of the <i>katabasis</i>, the
journey Underground into Hades, the belly of the whale, or the hero's
own unconscious world, is the broader symbolism with which a given
modern author is concerned. The unnamed protagonist of Ralph Ellison's
<i>Invisible Man</i> "descended, like Dante, into the depths," and in
addition to this he delves into the Cyclops' cave, which sounds more
like Homer's <i>Odyssey</i>; is led through a Harlem riot by Sybil,
perhaps a composite figure (Sybil from Virgil's <i>Aeneid</i>, and the
lover Beatrice from <i>The Divine Comedy</i>); and finally drops down
into a sewer, where he evokes both Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Richard
Wright. The polyphony of texts haunts the readers with whom Looney is
concerned. Looney is wise not to linger on the particularities of
classical texts, by which I mean that even with Dante's poem, we learn
of its textual tradition and its translations as we go. There is ample
scholarship on these, and <i>Freedom Readers</i> is well-annotated and
points the way. For his part, Looney is at times much more interested
in the <i>idea</i> of Dante vis-ê-vis the black subject and, more
broadly, American society. Dante, and the beckon that his poem
provided, guided Frances Trollope (1779-1863) from England to a colony
of freed slaves in Memphis, Tennessee (named Nashoba), and when she
lost hope there, she was in part responsible for a bazaar in
Cincinnati, where life-sized figures from the <i>Inferno</i> could be
found. In other words, Looney makes a strong case for the neglected,
popular place Dante seems to have held in American life, broadly
speaking.
As it pertains to black authors per se, Looney takes his readers
through general periods of American life, each section of the book
subtitled according to the accepted appellation of the time: Colored
Dante, Negro Dante, Black Dante, and African American Dante. Henrietta
Cordelia Ray, who flourished at the end of the 19th century, has
already been singled out by Classics scholars for her Ovidian
reworkings (see, for example, Tracey L. Walters, <i>African American
Literature and the Classicist Tradition</i>). Ray is the main example
of colored Dante, and Looney presents her 1885 poem "Dante" as
evidence that Ray saw Dante as "an engaged citizen actively trying to
use the rule of law to better his people's situation" (57). Here
again, Dante stands in for what he evokes, as a "freedom fighter"
interested in a language evocative of "legal and juridical activism"
(59). For Negro Dante, Looney first offers the filmmaker Spencer
Williams' "Go Down, Death!" and argues not only for his explicit
references to Dante's <i>Inferno</i>, but Looney also makes an
argument for the intertextual significance of Williams' splicing in of
clips from Adolfo Padovan and Francesco Bertolini's <i>L'inferno</i>.
Looney guides his reader down into a firsthand view of a similar
process of editing and redaction with Ralph Ellison's <i>Invisible
Man</i>. He reproduces the process whereby "I not only heard the muse"
becomes the now infamous line, "I not only entered the music but
descended, like Dante, into its depths."
<i>Inferno</i> comes into focus in Looney's last two sections
concerned with authors: Black Dante and African American Dante, about
LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka and Gloria Naylor, respectively. Here Looney
wrings his best textual work. He takes his reader through LeRoi Jones'
<i>The System of Dante's Hell</i>, the semi-autobiographical, 1965
novel that perhaps marks Jones' transition to Amiri Baraka. The
"richness" and "complexity" of Dante's poem lies in the fact that
Jones, who rejects Western cultural imperialism, still requires
<i>Inferno</i> for the structural integrity of his own work. Baraka
figures European penetration into black (male) bodies and minds in
terms of sexual violation, but he does so in Dantesque terms,
notwithstanding his exclusion of specific allusions to sodomites in
<i>Inferno</i>. And what of the black male's desire for such
intercourse? "Lust is now being conflated with literary affiliations"
(118). Baraka's acceptance of his own desires is much more conflicted
than Ellison's narrative resolution in <i>Invisible Man</i>, and his
struggle is no less labored; here too, as was the case with
<i>Invisible Man</i>, textual breaks, in terms of the writer's
revisions, leave traces of the personal trauma inevitable in lived
experience. In Naylor's case, Looney is able to show that in the
absence of in-depth study of her deployment of Dante's poetic meter,
the <i>terza rima</i>, critics have neglected for <i>The Women of
Brewster Place</i> what is perhaps the author's best work: <i>Linden
Hills</i>. Looney establishes Linden Hills, an African American real
estate development that "slopes down and away from the city" (157), as
a site for reimagining of Dante's <i>Inferno</i>. The characters,
Willie Mason and Lester Tilson, are young poets, and the rapper Willie
(Dante) feels it would take an "epic" to deal with what he sees in the
Hills. Looney takes Naylor's own observations about <i>Linden
Hills</i>, that critics did not understand her use of the <i>terza
rima</i> or of color, as an opportunity to do just that. Here again,
his reading is intricate and astute.
Although Looney uses the aforementioned authors to structure his own
journey, he hints in other directions as well, thereby suggesting that
an interested reader might view <i>Freedom Readers</i> as a book that
begins where it ends (or ends where it begins). Put otherwise, there
are many paths to pursue here. Looney juxtaposes Ray to William Wells
Brown, the black abolitionist and author who was her forerunner;
Ellison to Richard Wright; and Naylor to Toni Morrison; each in highly
suggestive ways. He includes a coda on rap, with Askia M. TourÄ's
"Infernos: A Groit-Song," N. J. Loftis' <i>Black Anima</i>, and Dudley
Randall's "My Muse," and in each case the sense is that of beginning
again, as he opens onto another vista, other possible subjects to read
in terms of Dante's influence. Outside of the margins of <i>Freedom
Readers</i> is the dramatist Owen Dodson (1914-1983), one of the most
important African American poets after the Harlem Renaissance, whose
play <i>Divine Comedy</i> is worth a look. Poems like Dodson's
"Prisoners" suggest that for him Dante was a pervasive influence. To
come full circle, it would also be worth considering American authors
who were not necessarily African American but for whom the black
subject was an interest. After all, Looney starts with Dante and the
American Protestants and Abolitionists, white and black alike, and his
project is suggestive of the integrity of the American experience.
These are, of course, trails for others; Looney has successfully
guided readers along an illuminating path.
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